📢 Apply to our (2-year) research fellowships at @iast.fr Join a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and indisciplinary group of scholars in Toulouse, walkable/cyclable pink city of chocolatines in the South of France. Deadline: November 15, 2025. www.iast.fr/research-fel...

I wrote something up about how the H-1B fee could harm US higher education and the communities that rely on it. open.substack.com/pub/brendanc...

People keep talking about tech firms in relation to the H1-B $100k fee but it’s gonna really sink universities.

📣 Job alert! *Assistant Prof in Computational Social Science*. We're a friendly department, with sharp students, at a great institution, in a lovely city. We have real strengths in computational social science & are looking for a colleague to build this further. Share and reach out with quesions!

Prof. Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social will join us in Copenhagen on Wed, Sep 24, 12:30-13:15 to present at an exciting data science seminar! Topic: Why Use An Evolutionary Perspective To Study Culture? To attend, see: nerds.itu.dk/event/data-s...

How to quantify the impact of AI on long-run cultural evolution? Published today, I give it a go! 400+ years of strategic dynamics in the game of Go (Baduk/Weiqi), from feudalism to AlphaGo!

I'd never read Frank Wilhoit's entire piece in which he posted his now-famous definition of conservatism (which turns out to be just a comment on a blog post by @himself.bsky.social). A concise and useful political philosophy. crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/l...

🚨 Excited to share a new paper 📃, years in the making, with Zach Wood. We propose that human evolution is characterized as an Evolutionary Transition in Inheritance and Individuality (ETII). Explainer and OA paper below:

LSE's Department of Methodogy is searching for an Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science. Applicants from across the social sciences are very welcome! Please reach out if you would like any more details.

💙New paper!💙 How is knowledge transmitted across generations in a foraging society? With @danielredhead.bsky.social we found: In BaYaka foragers, long-term skills pass in smaller, sparser networks, while short-term food info circulates broadly & reciprocally academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

people pretend that debate signals and defends a commitment to high minded politics. what it elevates instead is performative dishonesty as a basic mode of politics www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

it's absolutely critical to understand in this moment that people aren't largely reacting to who Charlie Kirk was as a person, but who they knew him as because of what tiny pieces of him got clipped out and stuck in their newsfeeds.

The count down starts for #CESRabat! Follow @ces2026.bsky.social and join us May 11-13 next year for an exciting meeting in Rabat, Morocco. Massive thanks to the #CESRabat organising committee: Sarah Alami (co-chair) Mathieu Charbonneau (co-chair) Zachary Garfield Edmond Seabright

@durhampsych.bsky.social current has 5 (FIVE!!) PhD studentships being advertised! 3 to work with me on children as agents of cultural evolution 2 to work with @drboothroyd.bsky.social on examining school-based body image interventions. Please share and apply! www.durham.ac.uk/departments/...

I'm a bit more enthusiastic about interdisciplinarity than other-Paul, but I endorse this 1000%: "If you’re genuinely interested in a domain, you should be engaged with the work of other smart people who approach the issue—even if they are housed in different parts of the university."

My department is hiring an assistant professor of environmental behavioral sciences. The research area is open but we are particularly interested in people with research on collective action or computational social sciences. Happy to answer questions about the Doerr School or the department.

The pathologies of academic publications-as-currency seem to finally be reaching a breaking point with AI. I wonder what’s next (beyond the more foundational societal disruptions happening around us)

I'll be giving talks 3 days in a row in 3 different Danish cities later this month. If you're in Aarhus, Copenhagen, or Odense and want to listen to me yap, well, I'll be there.

Our posting is now up for a Lecturer (Asst prof) in Social Psych at the University of Auckland Please apply! Portal closes 20 Oct NZT. That's the 19th stateside bc here in New Zealand we live in the future I'm not on the committee so am unconflicted and happy to chat with interested folks

It’s really distressing how many people I talk to who want to believe everything will just resolve and we’ll go back to the way things were.

I found this abstract I submitted (unsuccessfully) to a session on "cultural evolution in the digital age" for the first CES meeting in 2017. It's aged horribly well. Anyway, this is the kind of shit I'm increasingly trying to work on now.

This is just some awesome science. Ankylosaurs in the Jurassic period? With sick spiky armor and a spiky tail? That maybe evolved via sexual selection? Hell yes. Goddamn I needed this so much. www.nature.com/articles/s41... (h/t @juemos.bsky.social)

Univ of Rhode Island has an open rank faculty position in the Dept of Political Science to lead their new PhD program in Computational Social Science. jobs.uri.edu/postings/15597

This quote belongs on page one of every legal brief filed against this administration.

Yup, it's a sick system! Not only that, Gold OA creates its very own perverse incentives for publishers as brilliantly argued here: bsky.app/profile/psma...

yes. it is like the Holocaust in this way. you have never seen a truthful depiction of either of those things on screen because it is impossible to accurately depict them. you could not do it to actors, to children, you could not make it as bad as it was.

Today I had the idea to test LLMs on problems from the UK show Only Connect. Ofc, it turned out another group had already done it (@babaktaati.bsky.social‬)! tl;dr: LLMs were pretty shit at the Connecting Wall and were often fooled by red herring distractors. proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/...

A key difference here is that while either can be incorrect, the structure of Wikipedia *creates context* and the structure of LLMs *destroys context* Wikipedia has linked sources and an edit history showing where information came from and who added it when An LLM just generates text

When we search for scientific papers, we often rely on an algorithm - but do we miss important work? In this Correspondence, Zackary Dunivin and @psmaldino.bsky.social warn that current algorithms exacerbate disparities in science, and make the case for greater user control. rdcu.be/eASFa

I am excited to announce that the position of a senior postdoc (3 +3 years) in the field of theoretical biology is available in my group. The position provides the opportunity to closely interact with experimentalists and develop own research projects. Please RT. Details 👇: shorturl.at/iiiOv

If you are affiliated with a UC institution of live in a community that benefits from UC institutions, please consider signing this letter calling on UC Leadership to stand up to the Trump Administration. sites.google.com/view/ucstand...

I still can't get over that this is a real thing that happened. The US government is in the hands of literal cartoon villains.

Gotta keep up with the times.

AI filmmaking is peeing. It’s pooping. It’s throwing up. It’s a new kind of liquid coming out. It’s hated by the establishment. It’s what goes in the toilet. It’s wet. It’s what’s in the bathroom.

scallop appreciation! 👁️ tidalfarce.com/index.html?p...

Just got confirmation that my book Modeling Social Behavior will be translated into Japanese, to be published by University of Tokyo Press!

Our *new paper* explores how flexibility in social categories like gender and race can undermine unfair norms. If we can't read an identity, we can't use it to underpin discrimination. We show even a little confusion can be powerful, and advocate identity play philsci-archive.pitt.edu/26062/

I think they’re here to stay, but it’s worth remembering (and this will become increasingly apparent in the years to come) that, despite some clear benefits, LLMs/large AI models are a net negative for society and it’s not even close.

It absolutely is. It makes someone who knows nothing and has put in zero effort look like someone who knows a fair bit and is putting in effort

Predictable. The text corpora that these LLMs are trained on contain the most prevalent biases of our society, and so naturally the LLM will reproduce them because that's what they're made to do. #llmsareapoxonhumanity www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

One like, one clam fact

I did the thing you are never supposed to do. I wrote a (rough draft of a) textbook: Theories of Rational Decision It's technical, but from a philosophical perspective. It focuses on the normative theory but touches on some behavioral issues as well. raw.githubusercontent.com/kzollman/Rat...

Are opinions on controversial political issues as divided as many people perceive them to be? @ucmerced.bsky.social Prof. @psmaldino.bsky.social and coauthors Peter Steiglechner and Agostino Merico discuss their new study with Neurosciences News @pau neurosciencenews.com/perception-s...

Really great 🧵on the importance of oral histories and communal memory. In a time when many policymakers only listen when there is data (read quant/comp) community expertise is so important to truly understanding change/impact and needs.

This is a good piece and scientists should read it. The bit about research design goes by quick, but it shouldn’t be missed. There is so often a failure to tangle with thorny questions like “what am I trying to learn?” and “why is it important that I learn it?”

Bezos rumored to be buying Condé Nast, which would include Vogue, Teen Vogue, The New Yorker, GQ, Vanity Fair, Wired, Architectural Digest, and Ars Technica. Wired and Teen Vogue have done some of the best reporting in the Trump era. Ars Technica one of a handful of good remaining tech pubs.

Recently met a HS grad whose Americorps job suddenly disappeared when the entire program was axed in April. 2025 budget for it was $1.3 billion. When he got the news, he was on his way to Texas to paint low income houses. He'd been helping people living in poverty to prepare tax returns before that.

We're hiring! Join us to work at the intersection of social interaction and language technology. Postdoc and PhD positions in my Futures of Language research group, based at Radboud University in Nijmegen, NL Read more: markdingemanse.net/futures/news... #linguistics #interaction #sts #emca #hci